Donors have sent $962 million in Ebola response funding to eastern Congo. Africa CDC says the people running the response can trace only about $220 million of it.
That leaves more than $700 million in doubt, elevating Ebola response funding as the sharpest row of an outbreak that has now killed more than 4,500 people.
Nobody has shown the money was stolen. Nobody has shown where it went either.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention set out the figures in a statement on 15 October. Ebola response funding, it says, went straight to UN agencies, international charities and local groups. None of it passed through the Congolese treasury, a point the communications minister, Patrick Muyaya, repeated to the Associated Press.
So the government did what any coordinator would do. It asked the recipients to show their books. Only about a third came to the meeting with records, Africa CDC director general Jean Kaseya told reporters.
Those that did said they had received roughly $220 million. They had spent about $120 million and still held about $100 million.
Africa CDC called that “a significant lack of transparency” and warned that agencies which keep ignoring the request could lose their permission to work in Congo.
Kinshasa has already acted. Health Minister Roger Kamba told the Congolese Press Agency that only 25 of nearly 100 organisations have met the conditions for accreditation. The rest now face restrictions on their work.
The aid agencies see it differently. Julien Harneis, the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator, told Semafor that a joint system already exists. Africa CDC and the World Health Organization use it to track donor disbursements as they are made.
The government’s demand that recipients report their own receipts and spending is new, he said, and takes time. He added that 43 organisations had already filed.
That count sits awkwardly beside Kamba’s 25. The two numbers measure different things, but together they show how far apart the two sides remain.
A Congolese voice complicates the picture further. De-Joseph Kakisingi, who heads a network of local aid groups, says international partners demand traceability from local organisations but do not apply it to themselves. He calls it a “double standard”. Yet he concedes that Congo has no law spelling out what aid groups must report.
That admission matters. With no statute, the fight over Ebola response funding is about authority as much as arithmetic.
It is also a second round. Kamba accused aid organisations in August of withholding information on how they spent the money. He said then that $800 million had been given to Congo while his ministry could not find out how much was spent.
Those were also the weeks when workers walked out. As WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited Kinshasa on 5 August, families in Ituri province told the Associated Press that many frontline workers were on strike over pay. Bunia resident Anicet Baluku blamed the strike for the deaths of his two brothers.
No one has shown a direct link between the reporting gap and the unpaid wages. But the contrast is hard to ignore. Nearly $1 billion in Ebola response funding has arrived, and Prince Bahati, a nurse in Bunia, says many responders still report not being paid.
Another Bunia resident, Anicet Kakule, lost a friend in a treatment centre for lack of adequate care. He understands why some people believe “Ebola has become a business for many NGOs”. The same report notes that allegations of mismanagement in earlier outbreaks fed community mistrust and made the virus harder to stop.
The pattern is familiar. In 2014, Sierra Leone’s Audit Service found $3.7 million in Ebola response funding with no supporting documents. It also found $3.9 million, meant for ambulances and a treatment centre at Port Loko, that could not be traced.
Those sums were counted in single digit millions. And there was one saving grace. The state held the money, so an audit could find the holes. In Congo, the state never held this money. That is the structural difference behind the current fight.
Donors keep adding to Ebola response funding all the same. The US State Department, which calls itself the largest financial contributor, announced a further $267 million at the UN General Assembly in September.
A G20 ministerial it convened on 30 September took total pledges past $2 billion. Pledges are not cash in the field, but the bigger the pot, the louder the question.
The agencies still say they are short. WHO’s $115 million Ebola budget is 80 per cent funded, spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told Semafor, while UNICEF in Congo faces a 65 per cent gap. They are asking for more money while questions swirls around where the last money went.
The virus has not paused. Authorities have recorded at least 9,400 cases since the outbreak was declared in mid-May. It has reached eight Congolese provinces and Kenya, and Nigeria confirmed its first case this week. Africa CDC has called health ministers to an extraordinary virtual meeting on 28 October.
Ebola does not read balance sheets. The people living through it are asking to see them.
